Five SEO Factors You’re probably Ignoring

When brands want to build up their company, one of the things they aim to do is to put SEO into their content. However, they don’t always make sure that the back end of their website is as strong as the stories they want to put out.

SEMRush produced a study on the most impactful ranking factors for SEO, and it showed that using specific key words on a web page doesn’t offer offer the same SEO as some other factors.

For more well known sites that happen to get plenty of backlinks, it’s found that putting out more engaging content is more important that the technical side of their page. But, for smaller companies where that just isn’t a reality, the structural integrity of the site tends to be more crucial. Because if they set up their site effectively, it’ll make it easier to realize the benefits if the content starts to gain engagement.

If you know about SEO you'll be familiar with keywords, backlinks, and bounce rate. But if you really want to master the art of Search Engine Optimisation, here are 5 factors worth exploring.

Meta data

Metadata in SEO is what appears on search engine result pages (SERP) when a website comes up for certain questions. From there, there are meta tags which are snippets of text that describe a page’s content, that are only in the page’s code.These meta tags can be used for a range of different things, but not every single one is worth including into the metadata.There is an increase in the length of a meta description that Google displays on SERPs beneath a page title. What used to be seen the most on the first page of results was a description of 155 words, however from late November 2017 Google has been ushering in SERPs with a description of 300+ characters.Although meta descriptions are not a ranking factor that search engines evaluate, it is still important to write your meta descriptions to stay on trend with the latest algorithms, to make sure your competitors aren’t getting an edge with more valuable copy.

Site speed

Everyone wants to add a lot java and CSS to their website to make it more exciting and interactive to their users. However, less is more in this respect, especially if the files are not compressed and minified on the page. Because, Google confirmed that the speed of ones website does influence the SERPs.People don’t want to wait for a web page to load, especially if there is another site which will load instantaneously, and Google wants to prioritize the results that will delight the users.If your site loads faster than a competitors which has similar information, that in itself may be enough to rank ahead of that competitor. Site speed is also more important now that Google announced that from July 2018, the speed in which a website loads will also factor into mobile searching.

Schema markup and structured data

Along with the aforementioned metadata, web pages also have smaller elements called micro data. While metadata tells the search engine what the web page is about, micro data is the thing that reveals what elements are actually on the page.These elements can be taken care of by using schema markup, which is a code that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.Meta tags are able to validate what your site can offer in a broader sense, while Schema refers to a technology that provides smaller, more specific, structured data about your page instead.With Schema what you can do, is rather than over filling an article with a specific keyword, you can instead use Schema to signal that you want your content to rank for pages that include things like company names, products, and places.

Site architecture

For the people who aren’t user experience design (UX) experts, the idea of setting up a logical site map can be formidable. However, for those people there is a little thing called robots.txt, which is a file that tells search engines how you want them to crawl around your site. There are certain parts of your website that can hurt your SEO, examples being things like duplicated content, and complicated directory. One of the ways to cover up these issues is to look into disallow features, this will let you hide the content you don’t want to show, from the search results without having to delete any content from your website.However, robots.txt can also have a couple disadvantages if it is used incorrectly, such as it blocking directories that contain useful content which would lower your SEO. As well as stopping quality backlinks that could end up setting you back.

Mobile first indexing

With Google’s introduction of mobile-first indexing, it is becoming more important to check on the structure of your website, because in 2017 for the first time mobile traffic beat out desktop traffic. And it doesn’t seem that the trend is not planning on changing.Meaning, Google will start to make your primary website when indexing, your mobile website. So, instead of being a best practise technique to build your site with the mobile user in mind, it’s now a necessity.

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